Interview with Sablono

We met with Lukas Olbrich the co-founder and co-CEO at Sablono.Sablono is a software company founded and based in Berlin. The company is developing software solutions for the construction industry with a focus on project management and scheduling tools. The main product is Sablono BIMtime.

Who are you and what brings you to CeBIT?

My name is Lukas Olbrich, and I am the co-founder and co-CEO at Sablono. Sablono is a software company that aims at improving and enhancing management of construction projects. We are here because of a competition we participated in and now, because of that, we have the opportunity to stand here at and show everyone what we are doing.

What makes you unique?

What makes us unique is that we are working in a very particular field, that being the construction industry. Additionally, we have a challenge because we want to increase the level of detail in the construction process management by a factor of about 1000. Schedules that are created for construction management today consist of about 1000 activities for medium-sized projects, and we want that to be 1 million activities. That’s our big data challenge.

How many cofounders are on your team?

We have four cofounders. Three of us worked at The Technical University (TU) of Berlin.in research. We are civil engineers who specialize in informatics and decided in June to start a company together with a fourth member who has a degree in business administration.

What is your business model?

The business model is that we rent out our software as a service model to project managers and developers, providing them with a platform for managing and controlling the construction process. Everyone who is interested in having a better process management on the construction side can use our software.

You mentioned you started in June 2013 – are you already funded or looking for funding?

We are looking for funding. We have some investors on board who came to us in June already and gave us a loan. Now we are actually structuring our financing together with HTTF, who is going to provide one part. We are also searching for additional co-investors.

Are you looking for any special talents to hire?

Yes, definitely. We need software developers who are skilled in 3-D modelling, for example, and in database technology. If we have skilled people in that field, that’s always interesting for us.

Where do you see yourself one year from now?

In one year I want to have at least one of the large companies as our client, who is implementing the software and using it in at least three construction projects.

What kind of construction companies do you have in mind?

Looking at the German market, we find companies like Züblin, Bilfinger, HochTief, Wolff & Müller. These companies are really interesting for us. We also talked to Deutsche Bahn (DB) already to see if we can get together on that side. These are the companies that we were talking about, large sized construction companies at the moment.

Sablono is a software company founded and based in Berlin. The company is developing software solutions for the construction industry with a focus on project management and scheduling tools. The main product is Sablono BIMtime. BIMtime is an innovative software solution that creates reliable project schedules based on virtual 3D building models. The 3D model is thereby connected to Sablono certified building processes which contain all information on the manufacturing of every single component of the project.